Exit 11/15

In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France momentarily enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million peasants, suffer from a great depression. The good harvests of the past few years have forced the prices of corn much lower even than in England, and the position of the peasants under such circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by taxes, must be anything but splendid. The history of the past three years has, however, provided sufficient proof that this class of the population is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative. . . .

Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois [middle class] society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors—the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production—come into opposition with each other.

Karl Marx, 1850

Which statement best reflects Karl Marx′s argument, according to this excerpt?